


Queenly Masks

by Remeinhu



Series: These Fragile Bodies [6]
Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Autistic Character, Character with ADHD, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Neurodiversity, Parrleyn - Freeform, Undiagnosed Autism, meltdowns, parrlyn, skin picking/dermatillomania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24755467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remeinhu/pseuds/Remeinhu
Summary: After Catherine Parr is overwhelmed by the cacophony of the theater, she begins to look for an explanation for several things that seem to make her feel different from the others.
Relationships: Anne Boleyn/Catherine Parr
Series: These Fragile Bodies [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800094
Comments: 65
Kudos: 122





	1. Turn Your Eyes Away From Me; They Overwhelm Me!

**Author's Note:**

> As requested: more autistic Catherine Parr. I'm writing her largely based on my own experiences of figuring this out as an adult and then straddling the line of being professionally affirmed but not quite officially diagnosed. As such, please don't read this as a universal or definitive description of autism--which can look quite different from person to person, especially when you factor in the ways gendered and racialized socialization has meant that BIPOC and folks socialized female are often overlooked.
> 
> I'm writing her as having relatively low obvious support needs NOT because I think autistic folks with higher support needs are less valid--quite the opposite, higher support, nonspeaking, and/or intellectually disabled autistic folks are valid, valuable, worthy of life, agency, and respect, and actually include many pivotal leaders in disability thought and activism among their number--but because I'm trying to stick to, again, what I know from my own experience.
> 
> I'd be grateful for any feedback as I go along!

Catherine Parr was at the end of her tether. Unfortunately, they were only now finishing Megasix, with curtain calls, stage door, getting out of costume and makeup, and the ride home yet to come. That would be at least another two hours, and she felt sure she would erupt long before then.

_Come on, Parr,_ she thought, careful not to let the pressure she felt building throughout her body crack her carefully constructed outward presentation. _Nothing actually has happened. Be a damn adult and put up._ They filed offstage to await the curtain call, and Cathy blessed the momentary darkness of the wings. She took advantage of the brief reprieve to scratch under the top of her costume, internally cursing the designer who’d insisted that the bare midriff was a good idea. _If you like drafts. It just doesn’t_ fit _together, dammit! I have no idea how the rest of them put up with it._

That was one thing that had set the day off all wrong, if she thought about it. There was a particular type of compression top she normally wore under the costume that mitigated the worst of the irritation, but she’d somehow been left without a clean one for today’s performance, and the only one they could scrounge up at the last minute that remotely matched her skin tone was somehow _all wrong._ It was too tight at the bottom and kept rolling up, and too loose throughout the rest of the garment, letting in drafts and entirely failing to—well, hold her together was the best way she could describe it. So she’d gone through the whole performance with her skin feeling vaguely itchy, and everything inside her skin feeling somehow slightly too loose and sloppy.

_And good lord, could they make our stage makeup any oilier? I feel as though my face is covered in tiny gnats._

Before the fiasco with her costume there had been the car alarm in the theater’s lot that had kept. going. off. for what had seemed like hours. Then she’d been overruled about where to order lunch—she knew it was hardly mature to be as picky about her food as she was, but dammit, bell peppers made her gag, and raw onions left an aftertaste that would bother her for hours—so she had wound up making do with a yogurt and a granola bar from the pharmacy next door and now she was _fucking hungry_. _Then_ some tech malfunctions meant that their pre-show routine had been upended. And _THEN_ she’d barked her shin on her dressing table.

The upshot of all this was that the show’s lights seemed brighter and more hostile than usual. The music seemed louder and harsher, and if she hadn’t known better she could have sworn they’d mic’d the damn audience.

By the end of “Don’t Lose Ur Head” she thought _her_ head might explode. Fortunately, “Heart of Stone” offered a brief respite, but then “Haus of Holbein” turned everything up to eleven and it had taken everything she had not to shriek “No! Christina of Denmark turned _him_ down!” during the Tindr scene. The adrenaline from anticipating her own solo pulled her through the rest of the program, but then all the strobes and flashing phones in Megasix sent her dangerously close to the edge.

The thought of all those _people_ crowding in around her during stage door was unbearable, and she could feel herself starting to panic. _Parr, goddamn it! You’re a professional, pull it together!_ The scolding she gave herself didn’t work, and the pressure…everywhere, in her chest, in her face, her limbs…was building to a crisis point.

By some miracle she made it through the curtain call in one piece, but the instant she got offstage she tore off her top, tears leaking from her eyes. “Sorry!” she gasped. “Can’t do stage door. Just can’t,” and bolted to her dressing room.

Once inside she struggled out of the rest of her costume, getting tangled in her leggings and falling to her knees in the process. She scrubbed at her face with the ill-fitting compression top. She knew she’d regret not taking the time to properly remove her makeup, but she just didn’t have the energy to find the jar of cold cream, unscrew the lid, carefully apply it to her face, and dab it off carefully. Grasping the oversized t-shirt that was, mercifully, hanging over the back of her chair, she yanked it over her head and down around her bottom. She wanted to turn the lights off, but suddenly the switch, all the way across the room, seemed impossibly far away.

Whimpering slightly under her breath, she crawled into the space beneath her dressing table. She drew her knees up to her chest and squeezed her arms around them, curling her head down so that her knees would block some of the light, and rocked back and forth, letting her tears finally fall.

___

“Cath?” Anne’s voice broke through the whirlwind inside her head. Cathy raised her eyes just enough to see her girlfriend squatting in front of her dressing table and looking at her with a mixture of tenderness and concern. “We finished stage door early. We’re just going to get out of our costumes as quick as we can, and then we’ll go right home. We’ll take off makeup there. She took in Cathy’s smudged eyes. “I’ll help you out with yours, okay? Right now you look like a masked ferret. It’s strangely sexy.”

Cathy laughed weakly, grateful for Anne’s segue into their characteristic banter, a script she knew so well it had become a part of her. “Well, in early modern European art mustelids did have a range of sexual and fertility symbolism. Maybe I meant all this as an elaborate come-on.”

Anne reached out a hand, then hesitated. “This okay?” Cathy nodded, so Anne ruffled her hair. Both of them winced when her fingers encountered a spot on her scalp, still wet with blood, where she’d gouged it with her nails in an attempt to ground herself, but Anne knew better than to say anything, not least because she often did the same to her own scalp and shoulders when she was too restless to contain herself. “You know perfectly well that you don’t need to do weasel drag to get me into your pants, love. All you have to do is say something like ‘heteroglossia.’ Or ‘parallelism.’”

“What about _waṣf_? Although usually when I say that I’m talking about the Song of Songs, so that seems like cheating.”

“Cathy. Do you want to get out of here quickly or not?”

“Yes.” Cathy sighed, leaning her head, which felt unaccountably heavy, into Anne’s touch.

“Think you can manage to get back into your street clothes?”

“Yeah, but I think I accidentally kicked one of my trainers under the other clothes rack. Could you maybe find it for me?”

“Of course, love. Here—” Anne reached out with her other arm to help Cathy up, guiding her so that she didn’t smack her forehead on the underside of the dressing table. Once they were both upright, Anne held her tightly for a long moment. “Let’s get you home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Clearly, one of Cathy's special interests is Biblical studies. I imagine that when she came back and realized just how much feminist, womanist, Black, queer, etc. Biblical criticism was out there now, she was sure she'd actually gone to heaven.
> 
> *A waṣf is a form of ancient through medieval Near Eastern love/erotic poetry that reads as something like a descriptive list of the object's attributes. For readers in the west, the most familiar example of waṣf can be found in several places in the Biblical Song of Songs, such as in the verses (SoS 6:5-7) that contain the chapter title:
> 
> (5) Turn your eyes away from me, For they overwhelm me!  
> Your hair is like a flock of goats Streaming down from Gilead.
> 
> (6) Your teeth are like a flock of ewes  
> Climbing up from the washing pool;  
> All of them bear twins, And not one loses her young.
> 
> (7) Your brow behind your veil  
> [Gleams] like a pomegranate split open.
> 
> (NJPS translation)
> 
> Incidentally, if you're not already aware and can't believe that such is in the Bible, I assure you that the Song of Songs is downright SMUTTY. Hence Cathy's comment that referencing it would be cheating.


	2. From the Dens of Lions; From the Hills of Leopards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy considers the pros and cons of seeking a formal autism diagnosis.

Later that night, finally scrubbed, fed, and in comfortable clothes, Cathy stared at her laptop screen, pursing her lips. Tonight had been _especially_ bad, but it hadn’t been the first time something like this had happened. Maybe it didn’t always end in her bolting away from the stage and hiding under a table, but often it did end with her storming away from the rest of the queens in a huff that embarrassed her even as she felt herself succumb to it, or snapping viciously at someone who didn’t deserve her waspishness in the slightest.

(She cringed, thinking of the time just last week she had barked at Jane, “would you _shut up_ already with that inane chatter? _Nobody_ gives a damn that you’re getting a cup of tea and that you can’t decide between blackcurrant and earl grey! Don’t you have _anything_ more worthwhile to talk about?!” She’d had a headache all morning, and _none_ of her clothes seemed to fit right, and Jane seemed to need to narrate every minor decision out loud, and she’d read the same page three times already in her brand new copy of _Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible,_ which she’d been so excited to finally receive, and now Jane was interrupting her flow over and over…

Jane had looked so utterly _wounded_ when she had said that. Cathy belatedly realized she’d hit Jane squarely below the belt, and she squeaked out an apology before racing to her room and curling up under her duvet).

Then there were the times she couldn’t shake the sense that entire conversations were happening in a meter that had shifted _just_ enough from the one she’d been in sync with that she always felt a half-step behind the beat, and no matter how many times she re-calibrated and tried to come in again at the beginning of the next measure, she was _still_ behind.

(There was the time, for example, Kitty and Anne and Anna had been sharing stories of some mischief they’d gotten into the previous weekend, and she’d been nominally a part of the conversation, except every time she thought of a story she could relate to the ones they were telling and tried to break in, they’d somehow moved on from that detail…

“Cathy, you were awfully quiet,” Anna had remarked, and Cathy had been caught between gratitude that they’d _noticed_ her after all, and annoyance that if they’d noticed she wasn’t joining in, why the hell didn’t they make space for her?)

Or the times she’d start in telling someone something on a topic that filled her with excitement and joy, and realize several minutes later that her interlocutor might as well have been watching paint dry for all the interest they showed. For some reason, that hurt her worst of all—couldn’t they see how _interesting_ this was, and how important it was to her? And goodness, she didn’t know where to begin with the times that someone got something _wrong_ about one of her interests and then had the gall to resent it when she tried gently to set them right.

(“Don’t your beliefs about the Bible contradict the stances you take on feminism and LGBTQ+ rights?” the interviewer had asked. “I mean, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example…”

“First of all,” Cathy had begun, “if you’re going to pick a text that presents a problem for queer and feminist believers, Sodom and Gomorrah is utterly the wrong one. There are a _number_ of interpretive traditions from antiquity through the present day, not to mention a great deal of academic Biblical scholarship, all of which are very clear that the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are about inhospitality and sexual violence and coercion. We only start to see the interpretation that the problem was male-male intercourse in Philo, whose reading then gets picked up by Augustine. But, for example, when Origen discusses the sins of those cities he focuses almost entirely on inhospitality…”

She’d only been answering the fucking question—or, more precisely, explaining why the question’s foundational premise was in error—but the interviewer’s eyes glazed over, and he eventually cut her off and pivoted to something pointless).

If she thought about all those things systematically, together they pointed strongly toward one particular explanation, one which had occurred to her many times before ever since she’d first read about it, but now suddenly seeing how well it really fit her took on greater urgency.

She opened a new browser tab, and typed in “autism in adults.”

___

A great deal of reading later, Cathy was convinced of two things: first, she was _sure_ that “adult autism” described her perfectly, especially after reading about the ways women—particularly women of color—were often overlooked in both popular portrayals and medical accounts of the neurotype.

Second, she was certain that convincing a professional to diagnose her would be fiendishly difficult.

_One enormous problem is that I have no idea how to answer the questions about my childhood, or really, any of my first life._ To begin with, she was, like the rest of them, still unclear as to how much the realities of her first body affected the realities of this one. Then there was the fact that, even if she could see continuities between her two lives, sixteenth-century norms—court norms, especially!— had been so different. Some of what made her stand out now would have been utterly unremarkable then; children, for example, were supposed to be solemn and formal, and everyone wore enough layered, structured clothing that she had always felt properly “held together.” There were extant categories that explained and accommodated many repetitive behaviors and perseverative special interests—indeed, as long as it had enough to do with religion, and it was the right kind of religion (which, admittedly, was a difficult thing to keep up with then), things like her studying and debating Scripture fell neatly under the rubric of “piety,” which was, after all, something to be admired. Similarly, having the day structured by religious rituals felt comforting and right _._

_If it wasn’t for the fact that studying Scripture for myself was something I felt I_ had _to do and that I couldn’t pretend I didn’t have the convictions I did, I’d wonder why, in retrospect, I didn’t become a devout Catholic. Things like rosaries and set, repetitive liturgies make excellent stims. I’ve been jealous of Catalina for that more than once._

Then again, some things had been even harder _. The stiff postures! The_ interminable _small talk! All the lying I had to do—that we all had to do—just to stand a chance of surviving that court! I’ll never know how I managed to convince That Asshole I meant it when I said I only argued with him to learn from him._ Every word of her speech, right down to the “ands” and the “thes,” had felt as though she’d had to drag them up through mire _._

_And for every word I was sure God Godself would come and strike me down._

But yet _again_ —in court everyone had been playing a part, wearing a mask. She’d learned to be an excellent actor; what else was etiquette but learning to play a role? _So long as I knew we were in a play, as long as I studied the rules, I could keep up with the script, because for all that court was a deadly and perfidious trap, it was one place I knew I wasn’t the only one pretending to be someone she wasn’t._

What to do about all this? On the one hand, she was disinclined to go through a tedious and, likely, overstimulating and invasive process only to be dismissed.

(She was growing quite weary of explaining the whole reincarnation issue to provider after provider. This was one of the few cases in which Anne’s and Kitty’s scars had proven advantageous, especially after MRIs had proven beyond doubt that their scar tissue went deep enough that it could only have come from an inherently unsurvivable injury. They got _looks,_ but since they carried physical evidence that by all rights shouldn’t exist, they were slightly less likely to be treated as though they were delusional).

On the other hand, she knew herself well enough to know that without _some_ sort of expert confirmation, she would be unlikely to fully believe that this was _real_ enough for her to claim, and, therefore, real enough to grant herself grace on account of.

_Well, fuck._

She went to bed that night in a haze of indecision.


	3. I Must Rise and Roam the Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anne's frustration with her own neurodivergence convinces Cathy to pursue diagnosis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a bit of a window into Anne's experience of ADHD. Timeline-wise, it largely overlaps with chapter 4 of _Gynaikeia_.
> 
> Again, I'm writing Anne's ADHD based on my own experience of the same--although I imagine Anne is combined-type (significant hyperactivity AND inattention), whereas I'm primarily inattentive. YMMV.

Over the next several weeks, Cathy became increasingly convinced that “autistic” accounted for her in ways she hadn’t even thought possible, but she remained trepidatious about seeking diagnosis. In fairness, there were several things that seemed more important to address on any given day, and her executive function was not limitless. The main thing, however, was still the sinking feeling that the whole process would prove futile, especially since she truly couldn’t say whether the relevant traits appeared during her childhood.

_But Anne managed to get a formal diagnosis for her ADHD,_ her conscience nagged, _and that also technically needs to account for one’s childhood. You can’t deny how diagnosis and medication has helped her._

And, in the end, it was Anne, through her anguish during a brief medical scare about needing even more grace and aid than she felt her ADHD already required, who finally, indirectly pushed Cathy to seriously pursue an evaluation.

“I feel like such a fuckup already. My brain doesn’t work right,” Anne had admitted to her as they held each other the night after her first doctor’s visit. “I already make your life hard enough. What if I end up needing even more help?”

“I don’t know what gave you the impression my brain works ‘normally,’ such as that is, either,” Cathy had retorted. She knew Anne had to remember the countless times she’d helped her through what she was now sure were sensory meltdowns, had used her own ebullience to cover Cathy’s confusion at some implicit social rule she’d found herself inexplicably on the wrong side of, had smoothly rescued her from committing to a public ramble begging to go wrong. And it certainly wasn’t as though Cathy didn’t know from executive dysfunction, given the myriad occasions on which Catalina, or Jane, or Anne herself had needed to prompt her to eat or sleep on a regular schedule.

She knew that even with the other queens, Anne used humor to deflect attention from…well, everything, really; jokes were reflexive for her by this point. But she especially used humor to deflect scrutiny from her own slips, leaning hard into the chaotic persona she’d cultivated for the stage.

It wasn’t that her humor, or her spontaneity, or her love of practical jokes and adventure were insincere. Far from it—Anne was one of the funniest, wittiest people she had met in either life. It was a significant part of what had attracted Cathy to her to begin with. But with the others she deployed it automatically, not merely for the sake of the laugh itself but to set expectations of which she would never be in danger of falling short. A Chaos Muppet like her could be expected to always mislay or break things, to pull pranks, to pepper most conversations with one-liners and off-color jokes. It was simply what she did, and any inconvenience she might cause would be excused by virtue of how entertaining she was.

It was very difficult for a Chaos Muppet to fail. It was very difficult for a Chaos Muppet to feel hurt or rejected, because a Chaos Muppet was always the life of the party and was, in any case, far too carefree to be troubled by something so trivial as other people’s disappointment.

Anne Boleyn, however, was not so impervious.

Cathy recalled an incident a few months back, one which had seemed minor but had sent Anne into a tailspin of self-loathing. It had begun with Jane’s exasperated sigh:

“Anne, would you for _heaven’s sake_ put the mail _in the mail basket?_ We would have missed paying this bill if Anna hadn’t found it sandwiched between _Fun Home_ and _The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes!_ ”

Anne snickered. “Figured it would help keep you on your toes, Seymour. We don’t do nearly enough scavenger hunts in this house.”

Kitty and Anna burst out laughing, and even Catalina smothered a chortle behind her hand at the face Anne made behind Jane’s back. Jane sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose as though she were fighting off a headache.

That evening, Cathy found Anne biting at her bottom lip and picking at old scabs on her shoulders.

“Love, what’s going on?”

“I didn’t mean to lose the bill,” Anne said in a small, quavering voice.

“Oh, love.” Cathy snuggled up next to her, gently taking Anne’s hands in her own.

“I was trying to be responsible and actually help by bringing in the mail, _for once._ I put it in the mail basket, and I even saw that the bill was in there and was _going_ to put it at Catalina’s place so she’d see it. But then—I don’t really know what happened, other than on the way to do that I saw the _Calvin and Hobbes_ books on the shelf, and it occurred to me that I wanted to read them again, and so I thought I’d grab one. And then I got sidetracked by picking the one I wanted to read and I guess I must have put down the envelope on the shelf for a moment and forgot about it.”

Cathy pressed a kiss onto her forehead. “I can see how that would happen. And I can see how it would feel like too much to explain to Jane in the moment.”

“I thought about telling her. But then she’d just say, ‘Anne, the kitchen is _between_ the door and the bookshelves, how on earth could you get lost on the way?’’”

“I think Jane might be more understanding than that. She does know what it’s like to have a hard time with something everyone else finds easy, after all,” Cathy said, thinking about how she and Anna had helped Jane practice reading and how even now she still seemed to switch letters around in her mind, and how utterly mortified she was about the whole thing.

Anne seemed irritated by the interjection. “Fine. Then she’d say, ‘I understand, dear. Why don’t you just leave the mail for one of us?’ As if I don’t know that I don’t contribute enough around here. As if I need to be reminded that I’m too much of a loose cannon to do something as simple as _bringing in the fucking mail?!_ ” She was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know why any of you keep me around. All I seem to be able to do is make a mess.”

Seeing Anne turn in on herself like this made Cathy feel as though her heart would fracture into a million tiny shards. She massaged Anne’s scalp with her fingertips, wishing that she could knead out her self-hatred as well. “I don’t know what I can possibly say to convince you that that isn’t true right now, but please know that we all love you. Especially me. What would I do without you to rescue me from boring the others to tears by listing every possible example of role reversal and gender bending in the Pentateuch? I never noticed that Kitty was absolutely perishing, and she’s so eager to please she’d have swallowed tacks before telling me she couldn’t possibly listen to another word. You broke in with a perfectly-timed dick joke that actually related to the point I was trying to make and gave Kitty an excuse to say she needed to use the bathroom. It was masterful, honestly.”

Anne had smiled at that. “Well, _I_ love your rambles, and I don’t want you to get put off telling them to me. Self-interest, really.” But she’d relaxed into Cathy’s arms as she said it, as if being reminded that Cathy sometimes screwed up, too, released some valve inside her.

Cathy remembered Anne’s palpable relief all too well. _Would it help her for me to be officially confirmed as Weird, also?_

If Cathy, whom Anne admired and adored, could obtain a professional explanation for why her own brain didn’t work “right,” would that help Anne herself feel less defective?

_If there’s even a chance of that, that’s worth all kinds of embarrassment and overstimulation._

She resolved to begin seeking evaluation the next day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *"Chaos Muppet" refers to Unified Muppet Theory, which is the tongue-in-cheek claim that we're all either Chaos Muppets or Order Muppets, as described in this article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/06/chaos-theory.html  
> Anne, obviously, is a hardcore Chaos Muppet. Catalina and Jane are hardcore Order Muppets. Anne and Kitty are low-key Chaos Muppets, with Anna being both more low-key and more chaotic. Cathy is fundamentally an Order Muppet who keeps finding herself wearing a Chaos Muppet suit and never quite understanding how she got there.
> 
> *There are many, many, MANY instances of role reversal and gender bending in the Pentateuch (i.e. the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). It's about as close as it gets to consistent thesis. Suffice it to say that Cathy could have kept going a LOOONG time.


	4. The Watchers Who Patrol the City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy seeks a referral for an autism evaluation, and discusses the process with the other queens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Signs you’re in a Remeinhu fic:  
> *The formula is: witty banter, snarky introspection, intense introspection, sweet/angsty dialogue, dirty joke to break the tension.  
> *There will be many large and cumbersome words.  
> *You will probably, and incidentally to the plot, learn more information than you require.  
> *A character from a completely different universe may have a minor role, often as a medical provider. (Hint for this chapter: queer urban fantasy of the mid 2010s).

As it turned out, despite her best intentions, speed wasn’t in the cards. By the time she had managed to schedule an appointment with her general practitioner and obtain a referral for an autism evaluation, another few weeks had passed; then, on top of that, the wait for the evaluation itself would be yet another three months.

“Look, Cathy, I have to be frank with you,” Dr. Lewis had warned her. “Personally, I think your self-diagnosis is correct, and if it were up to me I’d do whatever you needed to give you official confirmation and whatever support you saw fit. But as you know, I’ve got past experience with patients whose backstories are somewhat outside of ordinary human experience, so the difficulties in accounting for your childhood don’t faze me.” She brushed a lock of blonde hair back from her face. “The odds that whomever evaluates you will have similar experience, however, are not terribly promising.”

Cathy was, at the very least, grateful that she’d had the luck to rotate into Dr. Lewis’s care. She’d moved to London from Toronto, and after hearing about the six queens’ stories, had actually _asked_ to become their main provider.

(“Why were you so eager to take our cases?” Cathy had asked her at their first appointment.

Dr. Lewis smiled and looked at her hands. “Let’s just say that the vast majority of my patients back in Toronto had weirder stories than any of you, and a good half of them were much older, too. There was even one fellow who knew Henry—"

“Oh, _really?_ ”

“He really liked him, in fact—mind you, he also hunted humans for sport, so, consider the source.” She quirked a faint, wry smile. “Anyway, I’ve…seen some things, and what’s more, I’ve gotten _extremely_ good at giving other providers _exactly_ the information they need to help my patients in a way that forestalls awkward questions if it’s at all possible. I think I have skills and experience you all will find _very_ useful.”

Cathy wondered what else she’d meant by “weirder stories.” One day, however, during some errands she’d run into Dr. Lewis and a tall, pale woman with long brown hair, whom she assumed was her partner. They’d both been perfectly friendly, but after Cathy had accidentally brushed against the tall woman as they went their separate ways, she’d been glad she hadn’t been with Anne—or honestly, anything else that moved—at the time, because she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to resist laying her across a parked a car and having sex with her right there in broad daylight.

She’d _never_ felt anything of the kind before, or since. After that, she _fully_ believed that Dr. Lewis had, as she’d put it, “seen some things.”)

So Dr. Lewis was without a doubt the best place to begin. Apparently, her powers of persuasion only went so far, though. _Oh well._ “At least you’re honest,” Cathy said. “How would you suggest I phrase things during the evaluation?”

“Well, if you don’t want to go into the whole reincarnation thing, which I entirely understand”— she laughed huskily—"here’s what I think you can say. I think you can honestly tell them that you were a precocious and serious child who showed an early, intense, and perseverative interest in text study. I think you can tell them that even as a child you were what you could describe as hyperlexic. I also think you can honestly tell them that misreading social cues has gotten you in serious personal and professional trouble before. You don’t have to tell them that it was easy for even the most adept social player to get in that kind of trouble in Henry’s court, or that the trouble you got in was that you nearly lost your head. You can say…hmmm...being unable to know when your discourse on your special interests wasn’t going over well, and being unable to tell when arguing was inappropriate, would have ended your marriage and caused you to lose your job if someone hadn’t intervened. All perfectly true!”

“Well, that seems like a workable strategy, I suppose.” Cathy sighed. She really did appreciate Dr. Lewis’s bluntness and willingness to help her strategize, but she wasn’t looking forward to the whole process.

Or the wait.

“What am I supposed to do with myself until then?” she groused, mostly to herself. Dr. Lewis, though, took the question seriously.

“Honestly? I don’t think you should wait for the evaluator’s permission to claim this for yourself. Go online and find other autistic people. I promise you there’s a vibrant community out there, and for very good reasons a lot of them are likely to accept self-diagnosis as valid. If nothing else, find permission there to ask for the grace and help you need, and to take pride in the way you are. Use the time to practice feeling at home in your brain.”

“Also…” Dr. Lewis paused. “Have you discussed this with the others?”

“Just Anne, really.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’d certainly planned to. I just wanted to know for sure before I did. You know me—too much deference to expertise. Well, _real_ expertise, not some megalomaniac who was pissed he didn’t get to be Pope.”

“Well, even though I can’t formally diagnose you, would my professional opinion be enough for you to feel like you could talk to them?”

“I…” Cathy paused. “I still worry that I’m being insincere about it, you know? As though I found a shiny new thing and decided to grab it to make people pay attention to me? Or to get out of doing things I needed to?” She grimaced. “That sounds terrible coming out of my mouth, and of course it applies to no one else in my situation. Just to…me.”

“I hope you realize that’s utterly illogical.”

“Naturally. And yet, there it is.”

“Well, in my professional opinion you aren’t making it up. Even if your evaluation doesn’t give you the results you were hoping for, you display enough traits that you are, on my view, entitled to the identity and the support.”

Cathy smiled, looking at her knees. “You,” she said to Dr. Lewis, “are a very good doctor.”

“Well, thank you. As I told you before—I’ve seen some things.”

_____

The next time they all had the evening off, Cathy resolved to raise the issue at dinner. She was feeling deeply anxious, and more than a little silly about the whole thing, but Anne had promised to support her— _and_ promised not to let her back out of it.

(“Doesn’t this all feel a little forced?” she’d groused at Anne. “It’s like an especially heavy-handed masque.”

“And you, my darling, shall perform the role of Truthfulness, and I of Wit.”

“Perhaps you should perform the role of GoFuckYourself.”

“That,” Anne protested, “should have been _my_ line.”)

Now here they were around the table, eating Catalina’s _excellent tortilla de papas._ In other circumstances, this was the point at which Cathy would have started blithely discoursing about the history of the potato, pointing out that Catalina would have to have learned this dish post-reincarnation because the best available evidence indicated that the potato hadn’t been introduced to Spain from South America until _at least_ the 1570s…

Although she supposed that, given a bit of context, launching into a series of Potato Facts would be a reasonably effective announcement.

_Without preamble, and with typical social grace (please, O internal audience of one, note my sarcasm)—here I go._

“Um, everyone?” _Articulate, Parr. Very articulate._ “I have something I’d like to talk about with you.”

Anna rolled her eyes slightly. “Is it about the symbolism of the egg across religious traditions?” Anne kicked her under the table. “Ow! Sorry.”

“No, it isn’t. But in a way it is. Or rather, it’s about why I do that.” She was getting anxious and could feel some pressure starting to build up in her chest, so she wrapped her napkin around her fork and fingered the tines through the slightly textured fabric to calm herself. “You all know about how I hole up in my room all the time and have to be reminded to eat and sleep, and how I usually can’t stand crowds, or bright lights, or loud noises—which is rather inconvenient for a performer, I realize. You’ve all been on the wrong end of it when I seem to snap for no clear reason, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes seem to be a bit socially awkward, and that I’m kind of…klutzy. And, well, obviously—” she laughed weakly—“you know I’m constantly giving all of you more information than you require.”

Anna frowned. “I hope you don’t think we mind at all, _schätze._ I was just ribbing you before. I mean, none of us like getting snapped at, but it isn’t as though you’re the only offender there by any means!”

“Besides which,” Jane added, “we learn so much from you, even if we do occasionally get a little lost in the differences between apodictic and casuistic laws. It’s like having our very own encyclopedia.”

“Apodictic laws are the kinds that start with ‘Thou shalt’ or something like that, and casuistic laws are legal stories that start something like ‘If a man has…’” Anne cleared her throat, and Cathy caught herself. “Er. Ahem. I truly appreciate that, thank you. But it’s seemed to me for a little bit right now that this whole constellation of traits might have an explanation, and after I completely fell apart after curtain a couple months back, I started looking into it more seriously. I did some research, and last week I went to see Dr. Lewis so that she could refer me to get an autism evaluation. So, er,” she finished weakly, jiggling her leg and squeezing her fork for dear life, “that’s what I wanted to say.”

There was a brief silence during which Cathy swore everyone must be able to see her practically vibrating with anxiety. She wasn’t sure what response she wanted from them—clearly she wanted to be believed, but “oh, how wonderful that you told us, that’s so brave!” seemed patronizing and cloying to her.

“Oh,” said Kitty. “I thought we already knew that.”

Cathy was caught off-guard. “What?”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to take anything away from you, and I’m glad you told us! But…I don’t know, I sort of assumed that went without saying.”

“Kitty, dear, I admit I’m a bit confused,” Jane said. “This wasn’t a category that existed in our old lives—how was it obvious to you? How did you learn about it?”

“I mean, I have the internet just like the rest of you! But as for why I looked it up? I suppose that once I started getting therapy for my PTSD and understanding why the things that happened to me had the specific effects that they do, I got curious about what was going on with the rest of us, so I started reading. Nan, I don’t know if you remember, but I was actually the one who suggested you might have ADHD.”

Anne smiled. “ _That’s_ not the sort of thing I forget—how could I? I don’t know if I ever thanked you, Kitten, but—thank you.”

“And, Cathy,” Kitty continued, “I mean, you do tick most of the boxes. In addition to everything you said, you only like being touched in very specific ways—but you _really_ like those. You’re very picky about how your clothes fit and about your food, you read the same leisure books over and over, and when you don’t have one of your favorite pens with you at the theater to fiddle with, you’re _noticeably_ crankier. And you don’t make eye contact with anyone if you can help it.”

“Wait, she doesn’t?” Catalina, Jane, and Anna said in unison.

“No,” Cathy admitted. “It feels weird and intense, like I’m staring at you while you’re changing clothes. But I know it’s expected, so I look at people’s foreheads. Or I focus out a little so I’m taking in their whole face.”

“Anyway,” Kitty said, “I certainly believe you and I should hope the rest of us do as well. We all have our…things…in one way or another, and I know everyone’s aware of how you’ve helped me through panic attacks—”

“Or helped me with reading—” Jane interjected.

“Or helped me remember appointments and stay on task,” Anne added.

“So, _mija,_ ” Catalina chimed in, “if there is any specific help you need from _us,_ please don’t hesitate to ask for it.”

“And,” Anna concluded, intuiting what Cathy had been thinking but hadn’t said, “I think I can safely say on behalf of all of us that regardless of how your evaluation turns out, if this is something you want to claim for yourself, we believe you and will support you completely.” She spread her hands and looked around the table. “Ladies, am I correct?”

Five heads nodded enthusiastically. Under the table, Cathy felt Anne catch her hand and squeeze it.

_Perhaps this_ will _be all right._


	5. A Garden Locked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy begins her evaluation.

Three months later, Cathy sat anxiously in a strange waiting room. She stroked the wristband Jane had made for her, of buttery-soft dark blue fabric with a textured rubber pad affixed to one side.

(“I thought you might find this helpful when performing,” Jane had said, measuring her wrist and showing her a few different fabrics so she could decide which felt best on her skin. “It would match perfectly with your costume, and when you aren’t doing anything with your arms during the show, you could even touch it to calm down onstage and no one would be the wiser. If it turns out to be helpful, they’re very easy to put together, so I could make up several and you could always have some at your dressing table even if you forgot one day.”

It _had_ been marvelously helpful during performances, so much so that Cathy had started wearing one of them out on other excursions, too. Fingering the rubber pad was a reliable stim, but even the slight pressure around her wrist that signaled its presence was grounding. It was as though she carried a physical talisman of her family’s care.)

During the wait for her evaluation, Cathy had done her best to take Dr. Lewis’s affirmation to heart and act on her advice. She’d found an excellent neurodiversity-centered community on Twitter. She’d even become an active participant (pseudonymously; her public identity was complicated enough at the moment), and after reading some of the ADHD-related content, had encouraged Anne to jump in as well.

She’d made several other helpful acquisitions: noise-cancelling headphones, ear defenders, photochromatic sunglasses, and enough of the compression tops she wore under her costume to ensure she had one for every performance of the week plus two spares, one of which lived permanently in her dressing table. She’d also tried to practice being more forthcoming about her needs to the other queens, although it was proving difficult for her to get a handle on realizing something was a problem before it sent her boiling over. But there were, she and Anne had figured out, things she could ask for ahead of time so that matters were less likely to escalate.

(She’d lost her temper at Kitty and Anna when they’d gotten into an impromptu karaoke match in the living room far too late at night for her nerves. When they made mutual apologies the next day, Cathy was going to leave it at that, but then decided better:

“I understand it’s more fun for you when it’s spontaneous, but I get really upset when my routine is thrown off—so _unexpected_ loud noises are especially bad for me. Do you think that in the future, you could take a few minutes to warn me so that I know to expect it? That way I’m not startled, and I can choose to put on headphones _before_ the noise gets to me.”

“That’s entirely reasonable,” Anna responded. “We’ll do our best to remember—and if we forget, we’ll owe you hot chocolate.”)

She’d also noticed, heart swelling, that Anne had seen her advocate for herself and begun to take small steps of her own in the same direction. The subsequent reduction in Anne’s episodes of self-flagellation and self-loathing, as far as Cathy was concerned, made every bit of the process worthwhile.

(“Oh, Catalina?” Anne tapped on her door. “I know you want the front room to look neat, but I would really appreciate it if you asked me before moving a pile I’ve made.”

“I’m sorry, I assumed you’d just forgotten, and that you’d have an easier time finding your gloves if they were with the other ones in the closet.”

“That _would_ make sense. But the problem is that when it comes to items like gloves, I basically don’t have object permanence. If you move them from where I put them last—especially if you put them inside of something else where I have to perform an extra action to get to them— I’ll never find them again. Can we at least have a basket by the door where they’re in plain sight and I don’t have to complete an extra set of steps to put them away or to find them?”

“I think I may have just the thing.” Catalina went to her closet and, after some rummaging, emerged with a wooden crate that had once held clementines. “We can put it on the table by the front door, and you can just drop your gloves and things right in.”)

She’d certainly grown more comfortable in her own skin over the past months. She’d even tentatively tried to claim the identity more fully. When she’d consulted with the wardrobe manager about whether they could possibly tweak her costume to be slightly less aggravating, she’d made a point of saying, “Well, you see, I’m autistic, so I have more difficulty with clothes that feel a certain way than some other people.”

The wardrobe manager had taken it in stride. The sky had not fallen.

Nor, Kitty (who somehow managed to learn every scrap of theater gossip) had assured her, had anyone subsequently whispered anything about how she was a drama queen who was affecting a trendy diagnosis for attention.

So, yes. Cathy felt, as a rule, far more confident in her self-assessment.

Except that now she was going to put all that newfound confidence in the hands of a diagnostician, and potentially see it destroyed.

She rubbed her wristband harder, wishing she dared rock softly in her chair. Two lifetimes of discipline, alas, made it near-impossible to allow herself to do that in public.

And then a voice beckoned, “Ms. Parr?” and she walked out of the waiting room, down a hall, and into a small office where she sat and introduced herself, and the interrogation began.

_____

She filled out inventories and answered the questions the artificially cheerful woman who sat across from her asked. She carefully used the language Dr. Lewis had suggested to account for her childhood and her previous life, and she described the meltdown that had triggered her serious research on the question. She described the perseverative interests and repetitive behaviors, the sensory issues, the feeling that she was always one half-step behind in many conversations. She told the woman about her skin picking, and gaze avoidance, and needing to have certain items with her, and she showed the woman Jane’s wristband (feeling, perversely, as if she were showing her her underwear).

The woman soothed, and chirped helpfully, and nodded, and wrote what seemed like copious notes. She peered curiously at Cathy, and as she did so Cathy realized that she was not displaying any of the behaviors she had described. When she told the woman about gaze avoidance, instead of demonstrating this by letting her eyes drift to a spot on the wall or out the window, she politely looked at the woman, focusing out just slightly to take in her whole face, as though it were automatic. Which it was. She turned her face to stare at the window, but that felt like she was performing the role of a character whose blocking notes read “stare out the window.”

She tried to let herself stroke Jane’s wristband, but it felt artificial and forced. She tried to let herself rock in place, but that was _hopeless._

It was as though she were suddenly describing her slightly embarrassing alter-ego, who did things she couldn’t access. What had happened, she realized in horror, was that her mind perceived this place as a threat, and so her court training had taken over. In such a deadly place, _everything_ she’d learned during her first lifetime told her, _be poised. Be deliberate. Be alert and pleasing._

And it made everything she was telling the woman come off as insignificant and insincere. She was sure of it.

“—all right, dearie, that’s it for today,” the woman trilled. “I’ll want to see you back next week to go over all this with you.”

So Cathy left the office utterly filled with dread that she had failed to convince the only person who mattered that her problems, such as they were, were significant enough to merit official recognition as such. As the next appointment drew nearer, despite the others’ encouragement, despite Anne’s fierce care (and her macabre, imaginative, and foul-mouthed descriptions of what she meant to do to anyone who made Cathy doubt herself) that feeling of dread only intensified.

And then a week had somehow crawled by and she was back in the office again, waiting (if the metaphor was not too on the nose) for the axe to fall.


	6. I Sought, But Found it Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy receives the results of her evaluation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go!
> 
> Cathy's experience here is very heavily based on my own experience of getting evaluated for autism. The evaluator here is a hell of a lot more annoying than the person who evaluated me (I actually found her pretty pleasant), but the lines "you've *got* the eye contact!" and "Yes, but just barely" are more or less verbatim from my own memory. Cathy's external reactions once she's out of the office are different and more angsty than mine were, but her inner monologue isn't too different from my own at the time.
> 
> As is probably obvious from my use of language and the times of day I post, I'm from the U.S., and my experience of getting evaluated reflects that. I did my best to research for a general sense of what steps one takes and what the process might look like in the U.K. (mainly relying on the relevant NHS websites), but I beg your forbearance if I've gotten it too wildly wrong.
> 
> Finally: if there's any interest in a smutty one-shot outtake expanding the scene near the end of the chapter, I'd be willing to oblige.

“Well, dearie,” the woman (Cathy hadn’t learned her name and she wasn’t sure she wanted to) said, “It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. You’ve got so many interesting stories to tell!”

“Er, thank you.” Cathy was unsure where she was going with this.

“I was watching you, and the way you carried yourself, even before we began speaking,” the woman continued. “You’re very composed, very poised, very deliberate. It’s as though you’re doing a dance routine you’ve trained for all your life.”

_Is she talking about the same woman who fell_ up _the stairs yesterday and nearly dropped a paring knife point down on her foot this morning? Well, in a way, she isn’t. My training from court made sure she’d_ never _meet that woman._

“There’s obviously a bit of anxiety wrapped up in that poise”— _well, no shit,_ Cathy thought—“but overall, you seem to have adjusted marvelously.”

“Where do the things I actually _told_ you about fit into this?” Cathy asked. “I assure you, I was being sincere. I really do, for example, find eye contact very uncomfortable—”

“—but you’ve _got_ the eye contact!” the woman interrupted. “You’ve learned to compensate even before you came to me for so many of those things, and while I’ve only just met you, if you’ll allow me to say it”— _well, you’re going to say it anyway whether I allow you or not!—_ “I’m already so proud of you!”

_Ugh. I wonder if she thinks I don’t_ want _to be the things I described to her? Because I am_ not _looking for reassurance that I cover it up well—I had my whole last life for that! I want permission to_ stop _covering it up! I want a fucking rest!_

Those words wouldn’t come out, though. The court training held, even as she raged against it internally. “Can we get to the point?” Cathy asked the woman, voice smooth and low, as befitted a queen. “You evaluated me for autism. Am I autistic? Or not?”

“Yes.” Cathy exhaled, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. The relief, however, was short-lived, for the woman continued, “but just barely.”

_Barely? What does that mean? That I’m_ just weird _enough to for everyone to notice that something’s off about me, but not enough to get any damn support?_

“So…what does that mean? What do I do with that?”

“It’s up to you to decide what to do with it!” The woman rose to her feet. “It was lovely to meet you, dearie, and I do hope you’ll call me if you have any further questions.”

The interview, clearly, was over. “Well, thank you for your time,” said Cathy, as she walked toward the door. She knew, dimly, that she should have stayed, should have asked follow up questions, should have asked for documentation, but she felt so humiliated, so frustrated, so defeated, that despite telling the interviewer—truthfully!—that spoken language was one thing she’d never had difficulty with, even as her mind raced she was somehow finding it impossible to ready complex sentences for speech.

_“It’s up to me to decide what to do with it?” I have_ no _idea what the hell to do with it, that’s why I asked you! It’s a non-answer! I wanted you to tell me that I wasn’t a fraud, that the trouble I was having was real!_

She felt as though she should have been boiling over by now, but soon her frustration and anger wilted into a throbbing, dull ache near her sinuses.

She took the tube home in a grim fog, shuffling the last block to the house and robotically unlocking the door.

_Empty. Good. I don’t have the energy to explain things._ She plodded to her room, dropping her bag and shrugging out of her coat. Out of sheer habit, she peeled off her clothes, but by the time she was down to her underwear she’d run out of steam, so instead of changing into lounge clothes she just curled up under her duvet.

She felt as though she wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. So she stared glumly at her nightstand, curling in on herself.

And that was how Anne found her, hours later. She reached out to gently touch Cathy’s hair. When Cathy neither leaned in nor pulled away, nor responded to a brief verbal inquiry, Anne stripped off her own clothes and carefully slid under the duvet, holding Cathy’s body tightly against her own.

Sometime thereafter, Anne finally felt Cathy tremble and, softly, begin to weep.

____

Once she had cried herself out, Anne had insisted that Cathy shower, and then eat a bowl of the rich _pho ga_ that was left over from the dinner they’d ordered in the night before. Now they were back in bed, and Cathy finally spoke.

“She said I was, but just barely, and that it was up to me to decide what to do with it.” She swallowed. “I mean, I guess it’s confirmation, but all she wanted to talk about was how _poised_ I was, and how _well_ I was compensating, and how she was just _so proud of me._ And dammit, I know I should have fought back and asked for documentation or a second opinion, or something, but the court training just took over and I left!”

“Oh, Catherine.” _I’m going to put pureéd sheep’s testicles in that bitch of an evaluator’s coffee,_ Anne thought, holding her girlfriend close. “I’m sorry.”

Cathy groaned. “This feels like such a letdown. Like I’m back to ‘well, maybe yes, maybe no, just like at the beginning.’” She curled up against Anne’s chest, rocking gently.

_Of course,_ now _I can let myself go. Now that it’s too late._

“Anne, do you think I’m faking it?”

Anne breathed softly into her hair. “No, I do not. I think the evaluator fucked up. I’ve seen you as unguarded as you get, love. I believe you, and I also agree with your judgment.”

“But there’s a voice inside my head that tells me I _am_ faking. That I’m making this up because I just want to be _special._ Or because I want to get out of dealing with minor inconveniences that everyone else just puts up with. Or that autism is trendy now, and everyone thinks they have it, and it’s trivializing the whole thing. Or more insidious, that I’m taking up space in a community that I’m not entitled to take up.”

Anne sighed. “Cath, did I ever tell you about what happened when I—impulsively, of course!—went public with my ADHD diagnosis about ten minutes after receiving it?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Well, I had the dreadful timing to do it just after some gobshite started a conspiracy theory trending—as happens, I later found out, every few months—that the motherfucker who pretends to run the United States snorts Adderall, and _that’s_ why he is the way he is. So it was at a moment when online stigma was, shall we say, flaring. And some of the things people said—that I was faking it, like I’d faked everything else in my life. That I was just hopping onto a fad, that it was all a Big Pharma conspiracy and that ADHD wasn’t real, that I was trying to get out of practicing and hadn’t people noticed my dancing and singing weren’t quite up to snuff? Someone even said I was using it as an excuse for the way I’d treated Catalina and Mary last time around, if you can believe it!”

“Anne! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was embarrassed. Because I admired _you_ so much, and I was sure you were so together, and you would have just shrugged it off. I’m supposed to be the Chaos Muppet, remember, and if I’m going to be like that, the least I can do is not let the bastards get to me. And…” she inhaled deeply, “because a bigger part of me than I cared to admit thought they might be right.”

Cathy hugged Anne hard. “I wish you’d have let me go after those assholes.”

“I know.” Anne laughed. “But eventually opening up to you about other ADHD stuff helped me shut that part of me up most of the time. It never fully goes away, of course, but I can usually tell it where it can shove its head. And when I saw _you_ start to be vulnerable and open up, too, and show me how _you_ were struggling, that helped most of all. I believe you because of _you._ But just in case you were worried you were being selfish, Catherine—I also believe you because believing you helps me.”

Cathy kissed Anne as hard as she could, so much so she thought she could taste a little blood. “What on earth did I do to deserve you?”

“I ask myself the same question every day.” Anne stroked her cheek.

“Is it utterly wrong that I want you badly right now?”

“I have no idea if it’s wrong or not, but I’m not saying no.”

“I think,” Cathy mused, “that after being so guarded with the evaluator, I need to let myself go and be exposed. You know every inch of me. Show me that.”

Anne kissed her, matching her earlier intensity as she slid her thigh between Cathy’s legs. What ensued was, unusually for them, almost wordless, but by the time they were spent, Cathy once again had some idea of who she really was.

_____ 

Cathy did not overcome the setback quickly or easily. But eventually she once again grew confident enough to begin wearing Jane’s wristband out beyond the theater, and to once again ask the queens, and the theater staff, and then slowly, slowly, others she encountered, for grace and support and understanding.

Then she began to say the words “I am autistic” again, and she thought that one day she might even be able to say them without a horrid little voice in her head whispering “attention seeker! Liar!”  
  
And most days, she thought, that might be—just barely—enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When Anne references the Conspiracy Theory That Won't Die re: putative stimulant abuse by the US's Evil Motherfucker In Chief, she is, sad to say, referring to something that comes back through the land of Twitter every six weeks or so.
> 
> In case it is unclear: please, don't do this. Evil Motherfucker In Chief is terrible not because of any speculated substance use or mental, neurological, or physical impairment. (If you also read Cathy's words about Henry in ch. 4 of "Gynaikeia" to the effect that the only morally salient quality of him was "tyrant" as a commentary to this effect, you were not wrong). He and his enablers are awful because they have made and continue to make choices that dehumanize, oppress, and kill people.
> 
> I, on the other hand, take stimulants because I need them to function, and while I am very far from being a paragon of virtue, I have never, to the best of my knowledge, deliberately put people in cages, exacerbated a deadly pandemic and blamed it on a minoritized class, attempted to gut an already insufficient healthcare system, etc., usw., v'gomer, and so forth.
> 
> When one treats the real or imagined physical and mental frailties of an evil person as somehow representative of their evil, this has little to no effect on the direct target. It does, however, do a great deal of damage to other people who happen to share the evil person's supposed frailties.
> 
> Thus endeth the lesson.


	7. There Is No Blemish In You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An encounter at the stage door helps Cathy trust her self-accounting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: public anger at a neuroatypical child about her characteristic behaviors.
> 
> Here we are at the end! Hopefully, the resolution here makes up somewhat for the heartbreak of the previous chapter. Many thanks, as always, for reading and commenting--the feedback's been lovely!
> 
> The smutty outtake from the end of said previous chapter should be going up as its own work in the next day or two.

Sometime later, during one of those rare nights when Cathy was actually enjoying the stage door conversations, she caught a glimpse of an angry-looking blonde woman holding the arm of a girl of eight or so just a little too tightly as they came toward her. She barely heard the girl say breathlessly, “and did you know that she was the first Englishwoman to publish a book under her own name, and..” but she very clearly saw the mother roll her eyes. As she continued to watch, the girl squealed and flapped her free arm.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Greta, if you don’t stop doing that with your hands we’re not going to see the Queens!”

“Excuse me one moment.” Cathy made directly for the girl, who was now grabbing her coat with her free hand as though she were trying to hold it down and looking like she was about to cry. “Ma’am, forgive me, but I saw how excited your daughter was to meet us—she looks delightful, by the way—and I didn’t want to keep her waiting.”

The woman looked mortified. “I’m so sorry. There’s no need to reward my daughter’s attention-seeking behavior, really.” Greta, upon hearing this, did burst into tears, and Cathy’s heart ached at the sight.

“Nonsense. She’s only excited. I’d like to talk to her, now.” She squatted down to the girl’s level, pulling a tissue from her sleeve and offering it. “I’m Queen Catherine Parr, although I expect you already know that. I’m very honored to meet you, and I’m sorry you’ve been made to feel bad for being excited about meeting us, and perhaps being slightly overwhelmed by everything going on here. I believe I overheard that your name was Greta?”

“Yes.” The girl sniffled, clutching the fabric of her coat in a desperate attempt to still her hands. “I’m sorry for being immature and obstreperous.”

“There’s no apology needed. It makes all of us happy to see that we’ve made _you_ happy.”

“Mother says that I’m perfectly capable of controlling myself and that I shouldn’t need help. She says that I’m not like those other children who can’t talk properly, and so I should be fine.”

_Your mother is full of shit, and she’s harming you,_ Cathy thought. “Well, first of all, I think it isn’t fair to ‘those other children who can’t talk properly’ to use them as a threat. ‘Those other children’ are worthwhile and valuable just the way they are. And second, just because you don’t have trouble talking and it’s easier for you to pretend that you’re exactly like other children doesn’t mean you don’t deserve help— _or_ that the ways you’re different are wrong.”

“I don’t know whether I believe you.” Greta’s mother, Cathy could see out of the corner of her eye, was about to reprimand her for this, so she held her hand up to forestall it.

“Listen, Greta.” Cathy was careful _not_ to look her in the eye. “I understand that. I know it’s hard to believe when all the grownups are telling you ‘just put up with it, it isn’t that bad!’ and ‘be quiet, nobody wants to hear about it anymore,’ and ‘just keep still!’ But you know what? They’re wrong. All of those things you do are fine. They’re how you express yourself and how you cope with the world.”

“How do you know that?” The girl wasn’t being fresh, Cathy knew. It was a perfectly logical question, one she would have asked in the girl’s place. So she told her so.

“That’s a perfectly logical question. There’s no reason you should trust just any person who tells you things. How would they know what it’s like to be you?”

“Exactly. Why should I believe you?”

“Well,” Cathy said, “I won’t tell you that I know exactly what it’s like to be you, because no one knows that about anyone else. But I think I may know a little better what it’s like than a lot of people, because I also have a very hard time with bright lights and loud noises and things that just feel _wrong,_ and I often need to do weird things in order to calm down. I don’t understand a lot of small talk, I often feel like many social interactions are happening in another language, and I have some things that I could just spend hours and hours thinking and talking about, and no one else wants to hear it. Does that sound familiar?”

“Yes.” Greta considered this. “If you don’t like bright lights and loud noises, how do you do the play?”

“You know, there are a lot of times I wonder that myself. Some days it’s just too much and I have to call in an alternate. Many days, just knowing what to expect and when to expect it helps enough. And if I start having a hard time, I have some tricks to help more.” She held out her arm, showing the girl her wristband. “This has a texture that I find quite soothing, and I can even rub it onstage without anyone noticing! Do you want to feel it?”

“Yes, please.” The girl reached out hesitantly, brushing her fingers against the textured rubber. “Oh, I like that!” She touched it more firmly, and seemed calmer.

Cathy made a snap decision. “Would you like to have it?”

“Isn’t it special to you?”

“Yes, it is. Queen Jane made it for me, in fact. But to tell you the truth, I have several more, because I lose them very easily. And I would like for you to have it, if you want it.”

Greta looked up at her mother. “Oh, may I?” Seeing the woman hem and haw, Cathy said quickly, “Ma’am, I insist,” and handed Greta the wristband.

“You must be very, very careful not to lose that!” the woman said. “Why don’t I take—”

Cathy was starting to lose her patience. “That rather defeats the purpose, don’t you think? Greta, if you lose it—actually, even if you don’t lose it—I want you to get in touch with me through the play’s website, and we’ll send you several more. I know for a fact that Queen Jane would be delighted to help you, just as she helps me.”

“Indeed I would,” came Jane’s voice, like cool water, from behind her. Kitty bounced alongside Cathy. “So would I!” Anne chimed in: “Is someone making a neurodivergent kid feel bad about herself?! Where’s the b— Catalina, _ow!_ ”

“Anne, dear, don’t overstimulate the child _or_ scandalize her mother before I’ve had a chance to _explain_ some things.” Catalina swept Greta’s mother aside and began to lecture her in a low voice; when the woman attempted to slip away she found herself face-to-face with Anna, who smiled charmingly at her (after reading about regional American idioms, Kitty had started calling this her “Well, bless your heart!” smile) and said, “Perhaps you’d like to hear firsthand what it’s like for a child to grow up knowing she’s a disappointment?”

Jane, Kitty, and Anne, meanwhile, had all squatted down alongside Cathy, whose heart swelled when she noticed that they were all very careful to avoid direct eye contact. “Greta, dear,” Jane began, “the truth is that more of us queens than not have brains that work a bit differently. I still have more trouble reading than most grown-ups; my mind switches letters around and makes them a dreadful mess.”

“I have panic attacks brought on by the smallest things,” Kitty added. “I love music so much, but sometimes, unless I know to expect it, just hearing a lute makes me lose control of my reactions.”

“And I lose things all the time, make impulsive decisions that often end in my breaking one of Jane’s teacups or worse, and I have a terrible time focusing on things that aren’t immediately exciting,” Anne concluded.

“Wouldn’t you all rather just be normal, though? I think I would. Then maybe everyone would stop being so cross with me.”

“Well, first of all, anyone who gets cross with you just because you’re a bit different can just get stuffed,” Cathy told her frankly. “But as for your question, that depends on which of us you’re talking to and what you mean by ‘normal.’”

Kitty glanced at the others. “I for one would be delighted never to have another panic attack again. But I don’t know that I’d give up the experience of having had them, if that makes sense. Knowing what it’s like helps me understand things about the world that I wouldn’t otherwise.”

Anne nodded. “I’d love to stop losing and breaking things, but I wouldn’t change the way my brain works overall. I love how creative I can be, and how I can make connections that no one else can! Besides, I think it makes me the funniest one of us by a long shot.”

“Personally, I would much prefer to just be able to read as easily as everyone else and have done with it,” Jane told Greta. “But I know other people with dyslexia who wouldn’t change a thing, and that’s valid too.”

“And I,” Cathy concluded, “would like for some things to be easier, but otherwise I wouldn’t change at all. How could I want to stop loving learning about things this fiercely? It’s everyone else who needs to accept me for who I am.”

She saw a flash of interest cross the girl's face, and hoped that, one day, she too would be able to say the same.

____

Once they got home that night, Cathy logged onto Twitter, and began a thread: “Dear Queendom: I have an announcement to make. I, Catherine Parr, am autistic, and proud of it.”

And though she hesitated, listening carefully, the horrid little voice in her head was, for once, quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those unfamiliar, "Well, bless your heart" is an expression common in the American south. It actually has a range of possible meanings--depending on context, it really can signal genuine care and concern. However, it can also be a politely veiled insult that carries various measures of contempt and pity, sort of akin to the Yiddishism "oh, you poor schmuck!"
> 
> Anna's charming smile here is *definitely* the second sense of "Well, bless your heart!"
> 
> I don't really have a great sense of how to write kids, so I do hope I wasn't too off-base here. I'm also aware that "Six" is probably *not* a show for eight-year-olds--I'm kind of assuming the mother didn't really do the research before bringing her kid.
> 
> Along those lines, said mother is coming off pretty badly here, as she should--but at the same time, she did go to the effort to entertain her interests! I think she does love and care for Greta a very great deal, but she has the skewed and sadly not too uncommon idea that doing her best by her means making her as "normal" as possible, and thinks of her neurodivergence as something to be mended and overcome.
> 
> Alas, I don't think that one scathing lecture from Catalina and Anna is going to change her mind. I hope, however, that it will make her start asking questions and that perhaps eventually she can come around. Meanwhile, I hope Cathy and the rest have started to convince Greta that she's fine just the way she is, and that she can carry that until she finds some allies closer to home.


End file.
